Status

Started: September 21 2013
Status: Active
Goal: experiment with Eagle and making pcb's and ending with an awesome thingy.
Who: Ardillo

Description

Thanks to the guys of puscii. I found out that there is/was an event at Ordina Nieuwegein and thanks of that I found the open source project of Tim Becker.

AnyKey0x.de

Tim designed the AnyKey0x.de which is a small development board. As an enthousiast of small-and-capable-of-a-lot hardware I really wanted one, and with me a couple others.
Since Tim made his project completely open source, I would like to thank Tim for sharing such an awesome project. All the kudo's (or base) belong to you.

RandomKey

The only change I made for now is just the text on the board, but it would be nice if we made some major changes to it. That depends a little on the enthusiasm we get from it. So at the moment it's just a fork of the original with no enhancements what so ever.

Building

Skills

Before doing this I needed to refresh my skills with Eagle. I used a simple howto guide on the sparfun website.SMD-SolderingEagle: SchematicsEagle: PCB Layout
In the end you'll have a fully (Sparkfun modified) Eagle setup and the knowledge to make a Serial to USB converter, because it's the training object of the tutorial.

PCB

Get the board printed by a company like smart-prototyping.com and search for the needed hardware. It is actually better to look for the parts first, but we'll see.
Zarya from hackerspace Bitlair pointed me to some PCB fabhouses. I pasted their URL's in the reference.
For this prototype I'm going to use smart-prototyping.com, but they need 10 gerber files instead of the normal 7.
Which can be found on their website.

Because the normal CAM processor only generates 7 of 10 Gerber files, I made a special .cam file which can be downloaded here. This will generate the asked 10 Gerber files.
No guarantee, I'll let you know when the boards arrive. (boards arrived they look good, but will they work?)

Check Gerber Files

You can check the files with a free viewer downloadable here. This tool is Windows only :( I ran it in an Win7 VM, works fine.

Costs

We did some calculation, what are the total costs of the project so far, and what would one RandomKey cost. Especially the last one is interesting when deciding to make a workshop SMD soldering with this project.

Costs of parts

Some parts are bought at the farnell webshop others at RSonline. This was done because farnell sells resistors and capacitors only by big amounts. We don't need 500 resistors for this project. Buying parts in small amounts is more expensive for each part but in the end it was almost €50 cheaper than buying the parts in big amounts. So maybe for the future, when we decide to make 500 handmade RandomKeys, this will be a solution ;)

NOTE: for every part I ordered a bit more then necessary parts we need, so we have some spare parts if some noob lets the magic smoke escape.

Costs of one RandomKey

Like I said above we calculated some spare parts incase you fry them, but it's a little odd to pay for spare parts when you don't use them.
So if somebody wants a kit, what would be the cost of that. Without soldering mistakes that is.